[General] future plans for Lively Kernel

[Richard Karpinski]

I eagerly await the new release.

I love the direction you are headed toward, with one exception.

Despite the wonderful advances in data storage technology, making a  
complete copy of ten or twenty thousand lines of code for each  
project seems excessive to me. I know I can avoid that by just  
continuing to use git for the storage, but that seems excessively  
retro to me.

What would please me is a system with the base and mods distinguished  
so that twenty little projects can consume only slightly more space  
than the unmodified system. You could say the base system was  
"transcluded by reference" in the new system or the Christmas card.

Transclusion clearly won't be necessary for the first Lively Kernel  
version without a separate git or CVS source code control system, but  
I hope it will be designed with that in mind and in the explicit plans.

Incidentally, there is now a roughly one page summary of "The Humane  
Interface"@http://bilconference.pbwiki.com/The+Humane+Interface  
for anyone who cares about making their system work well with humans.

> In case this all seems overly nerdy, the gestalt I am working
> toward is that each time you make a change, it becomes a new web page
> that you or anyone else can share and experiment with .  In that way
> the unit of distribution is the same, whether you're building an
> application, fixing a bug in the text editor, or making a Christmas
> card.  It's just that there are a few more things to finish between
> here and there...